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Today organizations across the globe are leveraging the cloud to boost innovation and productivity within the enterprise and consequently improve their profitability as well. Gartner called the cloud one of the top technology trends back in 2015 and now expects cloud adoption to be worth USD $250 billion this year. Use-cases are also constantly evolving. While the cloud has for long been used to host business applications, given that issues such as security have been mitigated, product development is the cloud is now becoming the new normal.

IT-driven organizations now need the flexibility to work flexibly with a diverse array of technologies that are easily customizable and allow for easier integration. This need for speed and modularity has propelled the rise of SaaS or cloud products that have shaken up traditional development approaches. The traditional, monolithic style of product development has been forced to undergo a radical overhaul. Organizations today need to be more agile and responsive. They must ensure that they reduce their time to market and release features faster while creating new foundations that allow integrations and continuous deployments. In this blog, we look at how the cloud has given product development, and launch a new age facelift.

More value and Less pain: With the cloud, product development organizations today can save themselves the pain of managing and maintaining complicated and time-consuming tools and technologies. Cloud products generally employ a common hardware infrastructure, are served from a common software instance and, often, use a common code base. This has made product development more cost-effective, manageable, and maintainable.

Speed of Development: The traditional software development cycle has been thought of as long and time-consuming. Here the product must go back and forth amongst development, QA, and deployment or operations teams before it is finally ready for release. Clearly, such long development cycles have no place in today’s business environment that demands work to be done at light speed. Businesses should make sure that they release upgrades and patch fixes faster so that they can remain relevant in today’s competitive market place. Software development cycles have become crunched, teams have become cross-functional, release cycles have become shorter, and MVP-like iterative development has become the norm. The cloud makes the software development cycle more efficient as developers can just focus on building, testing and deploying the application and do not have to worry about the infrastructure demands.

Collaboration: Cloud product development gives software engineers the benefit of real-time collaboration which ultimately helps in developing a superior product. Unlike traditional software development teams, software development in the cloud does not take a siloed approach and provides developers the capability to collaborate real-time in a distributed environment without worrying about customizing or upgrading existing tools or installing new tools.

The Importance of Testing: While traditional software development used testing at the end of the development cycle, cloud product development places testing at the core of development. This change in the development methodology helps in building a product incrementally, in lesser time and with fewer defects. Since a cloud product is used by multiple users, testing application performance in conjunction with the shared resources becomes central to ascertaining application performance. In addition, testing for SLA adherence, interface backward compatibility, multi-privilege tests etc. become essential. Development and testing are brought much closer together.

The Changed Launch: Product launches too have changed considerably in the age of the cloud. Testing product concepts has become much easier for one as information generated from connected systems can be accessed from anywhere and anytime.

Product launches have also become more fast-tracked. Platforms, frameworks, and backend services are all offered as a service under the cloud umbrella and hence developers do not need to spend time focusing on getting these in place before they get working. The cloud has also helped address the problem of capacity planning for organizations and development teams. Applications can scale easily so developers can make updates and releases without worrying about additional infrastructure investments or setting up additional computing resources. Load balancing has become easier with the cloud and has taken outage worries away with the help of load balancers and content delivery networks.

It can be said that with the cloud, product launches have become faster and easier as some of the major pain points that plagued development teams in the past have been removed.

Today organizations have turned to the cloud to optimize their development process, lower their application maintenance and operations costs, and to improve their cost efficiency. In the process, software product development and launch too have got a much-needed facelift.

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